More Human Footprints to “surprise” evolutionists

As I have oft mentioned, every time a new discovery of human fossil remains is made, the headlines are the same – “evolutionists surprised by findings” and “this may require significant reworking of the phylogenetic trees.” But when a model so poorly incorporates data, and so poorly predicts anything of value, and must be significantly revised each time new data appears, perhaps it is time to admit that the model is bogus. So here’s a couple of recent discoveries to upset the fantasy of common descent.

…based on the age of the rock where the footprint was found, it could date back even further than the renowned 3-million year-old fossil Lucy, the partial skeleton of an ape-man, found in Ethiopia in 1974.

It will be fun and interesting to watch how evolutionists scramble to discredit this finding, or redate the footprints to fit their time scale, or just retreat to their cave mumbling to themselves, “evolution is fact, evolution is fact.”

A collection of nine fossilized teeth found in Ethiopia is overturning previous evolutionary thought, reports the BBC. The teeth are thought to have been from a previously unknown species of great ape, named Chororapithecus abyssinicus by the team reporting on the find in Nature.

The fossils, believed to be 10 million years old, ‘raise questions on current theories of human evolution’ because previous evolutionary genetic research has suggested gorillas and humans diverged from a common ancestor ‘only’ eight million years ago. These fossils’ 10-million-year age led the research team to suggest that the split must have happened earlier than 10.5 million years ago. If correct, molecular and DNA studies will need to be revisited.

3. Mexican markings and chronological chaos is a nice review of the findings of fossil human footprints in Mexico, which are being dated at 40,000 years. As it turns out, this is a problem for both YECs and evolutionists.

The current prevailing idea, known as the ‘Clovis first’ model, dictates that the Americas were first colonized by humans (known as the Clovis culture) between 11,500 and 12,000 years ago. It is further believed that these people arrived in North America from Siberia by means of the Bering land bridge, at the end of the most recent ice age.

Thus there has been a lot of resistance from anthropologists to Gonzales’ 40,000-year age for the footprints in Mexico.

Evolutionists, however, aren’t taking Gonzales’ claims sitting down. They are using other methods to date the fossils – methods that support their time scale, revealing, btw, one of the dirty little secrets of archeology – different dating methods can give vastly differing dates, so you can pick one that matches your hypotheses. Isn’t that scientific convenient?

Fortunately for evolutionists, virtually any troublesome date can be ‘corrected’ by simply redating the errant specimen by the same or other dating methods until the desired age is achieved. In a recent issue of Nature (Vol. 438, 1 Dec. 2005), Dr. Paul Renne and coworkers at the Berkeley Geochronology Center in Berkeley, California, USA have done just that. These investigators redated the pesky Mexican footprints using the 40Ar/39Ar radiometric dating method and have concluded that the age of the volcanic ash in which the footprints were found is really 1.3 million years +/- 0.03!

But how, we might ask, does a date of 1.3 million years for the Mexican footprints solve the problem if even an age of 40,000 years is considered too old to fit the Clovis model? Simple – by declaring the footprints to be 1.3 million years old, Renne et al. insist that this makes them way too old to be human! Thus they demote the footprints to being mere ‘markings.’

Read this example of evolutionary logic for yourself:

‘If the markings are hominid foot prints, they would be most likely to be made by a hominid that existed before Homo sapiens and we consider such a possibility to be extremely remote. We conclude that the identification of any of these features as syndepositional hominid footprints is erroneous.’

In other words, although the ‘markings’ certainly look like human footprints, they can’t be human footprints because they are inconsistent with prevailing evolutionary dogma.

Well, QED, eh? Read the entire article on the Mexican footprints, it shows how fragile evolution is when it comes to real data, and it shows how blind evolutionists are to the circus they have made out of science.

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As I have oft mentioned, every time a new discovery of human fossil remains is made, the headlines are the same – "evolutionists surprised by findings" and "this may require significant reworking of the phylogenetic trees." But when a model so poorly …